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Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Firstly,
before I begin, I would like to say upfront that this blog post is
going to be a critique of a portion of Korean culture. Therefore, I
would like to start out by saying that it is difficult, if I may be
allowed to understate, to say what constitutes Korean culture –
it's not exactly quite a matter of listing a few points that every
Korean agrees on.

Korean
culture itself has drastically changed over time, particularly since
the Korean War . To further compound the issue, as with any culture,
the ideals of Korean culture are not necessarily followed by every
individual who considers him/herself a Korean. Many Confucian values
as well as traditional Korean values have since been modified,
updated, adapted, adopted, and co-opted by the modern Korean State,
and this, too, caused them to mutate into something that pre-modern
Koreans would not have recognized.

And
in recent years, these traditional ideals have met competition in the
form of personal liberty through globalization. To put it bluntly,
the ‘culture’ that defines Korea today is a mess. I hope that
whoever reads this will realize that I know that when I speak about
Korean culture, I fully understand that it is nearly impossible to
define and that, as a result, I have no choice but to generalize.

Without
further ado, here we go.

Like
many people, I, too, appreciate holidays – the comfort of home, the
tranquility of peaceful quiet. However, considering the fact that
today is Hangeul
Day, I think it would be remiss if I didn’t take some time out
of my daily life to sit down and commemorate Hangeul Day in my own
way.

When
a non-Korean (from a non-Confucian culture) spends any significant
length of time in Korea, one of the first things that he/she notices
is the level of conformity that exists among Koreans. Considering
the collectivist nature of Confucianism, which Koreans have
historically been strongly influenced by, and the numerous times that
Korea has been invaded by its neighbors throughout its 5,000-year
history, which forced Koreans to become more insular and protective
of their traditions and cultures, this should come as no surprise.

Aside
from history, Koreans’ conformity can also be found in everyday
behavior such as popular trends. For example, in Western countries,
where individuality is championed over assimilation, individual
consumers have a tendency to purchase certain brands because they
have associated those particular brands with their own identities.
As a result, brand loyalty tends to last a relatively longer period
of time in the West.

(Though
it is debatable whether this sort of individualism seen in the
marketplace is genuine or not, the
fact that the word ‘I’ is capitalized is reflective of Western
values.)

In
Korea, however, individual consumers tend to choose which goods or
services to purchase, at least partly, in order to conform with each
other. A very good example of this kind of behavior, though
certainly not limited to, is the sudden increase in the
popularity of North Face jackets. When one looks for a rational
reason for its sudden popularity, one cannot help but simply be
stunned at the sheer absence of anything that resembles rationality.

As
such, with the exception of certain ‘national’ commodities that
are protected from competition via tariffs or subsidization such as
Hyundai cars, Jinro soju, KT&G cigarettes, or your typical Korean
apartment building, product life cycles of most other commodities tend
to be much shorter. A new (or even long-existing) product or brand’s
sales will explode inexplicably one day, but often decline just as
precipitously.

More
telling than the distant past and trending behavior, however, is the
fact that conformity can also be found in the Korean language
itself; especially in the prevalence of the use of the word ‘우리’
(pronounced
as ‘oori,’ which means ‘we’ or ‘our’) in everyday speech.
For example, you will seldom, if not ever, hear a Korean refer to
his/her country as “My country,” but rather as “Our country.”
Though there is certainly a word for ‘I’ (나,
which is pronounced as ‘na’)
and ‘my’ (내,
which is pronounced as ‘nae’), the collectivist philosophy that
underlie Korean cultural norms shows itself through the more popular
usage of ‘we’ as opposed to ‘I.’

And
therein lies one of the fundamental problems that plague Korean
society – the philosophy that states that ‘we,’ which is
nothing more than a numerical superiority, somehow becomes
sacred whereas ‘I,’ the individual, is forced to suffer an
ignoble death.

It
is the philosophical assumption that individuals are nothing; Mankind
is all. Forget that Mankind is nothing more than a collection of
individuals. The collectivist ideal that Koreans adhere to imply
that individuals exist through, by, and for each other. It is
therefore not good to be different from one’s neighbors; it may
lead to sticking out, which one is not supposed to do. However, the
crime of being different pales in comparison to being superior to
one’s neighbors, which is utterly evil.

Is
it thus any wonder that Koreans seldom ever express strong
disagreement unless it is through the anonymity that is granted by
the Internet or the mob? Koreans almost always insist on remaining
silent rather than disagree for they dare not speak the thoughts of
their own minds. That is because Koreans have been socialized into believing that all must agree with all. But as they cannot know if
their thoughts are the thoughts of all, they fear to speak,
especially when in opposition.

Traditionalists
who abhor modernity and all the ills that are associated with it
claim that Koreans ought to return to the morality that was provided
by the teachings of Confucianism. There could not be a more perverse
idea. ‘To return’ implies that Koreans were once aware of a
rational morality. Considering that Confucianism is a school of
thought that has indoctrinated Koreans into believing that the
individual is nothing compared to the collective, and that this
school of thought has influenced Koreans for millennia, it would
appear that what Koreans need to do is not to return to some old
morality, but to discover morality – a morality that champions the
freedom of thought and actions of the individual; a morality that
allows people to know that the fact that they exist need not indebt
themselves to others, that they need not live for others nor ask
others to live for them. A morality that states that one needs to do
more than be merely born to deserve love or respect from one’s
brethren.

The
Korean language as it currently exists has made the word ‘we’ a
primary cause for an individual’s existence whereas the word ‘I’
has been relegated to nothing more than a mere second thought. If
Korean history and culture are anything to go by, the word ‘we’
must never be given the level of importance that Koreans have given
it. Doing so forces people to live a lie – to subjugate their
minds to a Collective Mind, which, in fact, does not exist.

More
perversely, however, the word ‘we’ allows the unworthy to earn
unearned pride (see “The
Irrational Challenges to Interracial Dating” for my notes on
unearned pride), which sullies the hard work of rational men. It
makes everything that was once clean unclean and once wise unwise.
The word ‘we’ is monstrous because it is a word that sanctions serfdom and shame while it suppresses free will.

What
the Korean language lacks, if not in existence, but certainly in
importance, is the word ‘I’ so that people can finally know that
their lives do not belong to gods or kings or the proletariat. By
championing ‘I,’ people will finally begin to realize that the
only obligation that people owe is the obligation to pursue their own
individual happiness.

Of
course, blaming the Korean language for Korea’s societal ills is
akin to blaming cars for automobile accidents. It’s not the
language or the car that is at fault, but the driver; the driver in
this particular case being collectivism. As perverse as collectivism
may be, however, it is nothing more than an idea; and the only way to
defeat an idea is to replace it with a new idea.

Hopefully, by accepting the supremacy of ‘I’ over ‘we,’ Koreans can begin to heal their wounds, both physical and
psychological. Otherwise, Korea will forever be defined by nothing
more than this:

It
is true that Confucianism, or whatever modern version of Confucianism
that still remains, has been turned into everyone’s favorite
punching bag when analyzing Korea. Though Confucianism has many
faults of its own (many of which can be found here),
blaming Confucianism for many of modern-day Korea’s problems is
akin to blaming Puritanism for many of modern-day America’s
problems. Though it is true that much of Korean norms are still run
according to Confucian ideals, albeit in increasingly diluted doses,
Korean society has changed so much, especially since the 1950s, that
blaming “Confucianism” for Korea’s societal ills just seems
quaint.

It
was difficult to disagree with TK until this point. From that point
on, however, TK’s position that Korea’s problems are caused by
modernity is nothing short of asinine.

Although
TK says that it is important not to idealize the past by bringing up
the fact that Korea’s historical caste system and patriarchal
values hardly made pre-modern Korea a Utopian society, it quickly
becomes evident that this is nothing more than cheap lip service as
he then immediately says:

“But
it is hard to deny that traditional Korea has certain charms that
modern Korea lacks. There was no constant competition or striving
that stressed people out – simply people efficiently doing what
they had to do to produce more than what they needed, and enjoying
their lives in the free time.”

It
is a similar rationale, if it can be called such a thing, that I have
heard from many Renaissance Fair-goers whose knowledge of the actual
history of Renaissance-era Europe was either non-existent or
rose-tinted.

But
what is modernity? The dictionary definition of modernity is simply
this: The
state or quality of being modern.
And just which aspect of modernity does TK disdain so much? It’s
clearly not the automobile or the light bulb that he despises.

What
TK despises is the over-competitiveness that modernity seems to have
brought about in people because, as he says, “modernity – whose
essential ingredients are industrialization and market economy –
demands incessant competition” while on the other hand, “in the
traditional economy, the one and only goal is sustenance.” He then
goes on to say that “the essence of modernity is to turn humans
into resources. Market economy and industrialization, operating
together, dehumanize, commodify and objectify humans.”

Modernity,
whose essence TK calls ‘toxic,’ supposedly turned people into
commodities, whether we are talking about 1960s sweatshop workers or
modern-day public educated white-collar workers or record-setting
plastic surgery rates or equally record-setting declining birth
rates; and that therefore “it is only a slight exaggeration to say
that every social problem in Korea is ultimately reducible to
commodification.”

In
other words, TK doesn’t despise the wealth or the technological
progress that have been brought about by modernization. What he
despises are “industrialization and market economy,” otherwise
known as capitalism.

When
TK says that Koreans have been commodified, what he is saying is that
individuals, through various means of socialization, have been turned
into easily replaceable unthinking automatons. But does capitalism
really turn people into commodities?

Firstly,
it has to be recognized that one of the fundamental philosophical
ideas behind capitalism is voluntary action. In a capitalist
society, based on the concept of mutual benefit, people are free to
cooperate or not cooperate with one another as their own individual
interests dictate; being coerced to cooperate or otherwise is the
very antithesis of capitalism. Under such a system, in order for an
individual to survive or thrive, the individual has to rely on
intellectual thought. Whether an individual chooses to cooperate
with others or not, the individual is acting upon his/her own
rational judgment. As such, freedom and rational thought are
necessary ingredients for capitalism to exist.

Secondly,
considering the voluntary nature that capitalism requires,
capitalism, or modernity as TK calls it, demands the best of every
individual and rewards individuals accordingly. Why does capitalism
demand the best? That is because voluntary trade with others
necessitates mutual benefit. What that means is that in order to
trade with others, others must recognize that my work, whatever it
may be, is objectively valuable and vice versa. It is this mutually
beneficial trade, which forbids mediocrity, that allows a society’s
standard of living to rise – even for those who do not take part in
this act.

Thirdly,
it would be supremely idiotic to claim that capitalism does not
require competition. However, no one competes solely for the sake of
competing. Competition has never been nor will it ever be the end
goal of capitalism. Competition is nothing more than one of the
by-products of productive work that is required to raise a society’s
standard of living.

The
fact of the matter is that competition as it exists under capitalism
is entirely different from the Hobbesian nature of competition found
in the animal kingdom – bellum
omnium contra omnes – which
TK seems to equate as being one and the same thing. In the animal
kingdom, competition means to eat or be eaten; mate or risk seeing
the end to one’s genetic line. Under capitalism, competition is
merely a process that is required for the creation of new and
additional wealth. For example, the effect of the competition
between farmers using horses and those using tractors was not that
the former group died of starvation, but that everyone had more food.
The creation of new and additional wealth, which was brought about
by competition, is what allows even the farmers who ‘lost’ the
competition to find employment elsewhere.

Fourthly,
of course the one and only goal of traditional economy was
sustenance. Mere sustenance or subsistence was the one and only goal
for the majority of pre-modern Koreans because both the law and
cultural norms of the time forbade ambition.

Pre-modern
Korea was a feudal society that was steeped in an inherently unjust
caste system. It was a society that allowed the aristocratic Yangban
class to thrive on indentured servitude and the
slave labor of the lower classes while they enjoyed being “scholarly
gentlemen.” It was a society that forced the vast majority of
women to learn (if they got any kind of education at all to begin
with) nothing else besides how to be an obedient wife and how to
birth sons.

With
the exception of the privileged few, whose privileges were the result
of the pure accident of birth, pre-modern Korean laws, both written
and unwritten, were designed specifically to eliminate ambition
because a people with little to no ambition are much easier to rule
over. When people are prevented from having ambitions beyond mere
subsistence under the penalty of law, when the law does everything it
can to suppress the mind, bare subsistence becomes the only goal worth
achieving. In other words, the law forced individuals – people
with rational minds, dreams, hopes, and ambitions – to lead lives
that were no better than that of mindless cattle.

Capitalism,
on the other hand, rewards merits and punishes mediocrity. It is a
system that allows an intelligent and industrious poor man to reach
heights that even the kings of old dared not dream while at the same
time forcing the squandering rich to some day seek minimum-wage jobs.

What
did pre-modern Korea reward? It rewarded those who were fortunate
enough to be born as boys to a Yangban family. The sheer accident
that was their birth allowed them to possess unearned wealth and
political influence. As for everyone else, the sentence they
received for the sole crime of being born as everyone else was a
lifetime of subsistence farming and manual labor.

TK’s
nostalgia for Korea’s pre-modern past, which he has clearly
romanticized despite claiming otherwise, is comparable to some
Americans’ idealized fancies of the Antebellum South. Just like
the latter, it is equally ludicrous and obnoxious.

That
Korean society has its problems is not in question. Its high suicide rate is a troubling indictment on how little Koreans value life.
That there is such a wide income/political power gap between those
who own or run the chaebol companies and everyone else speaks volumes
about the corrupt nature of politics; how the Big Government/Big
Business relationship is a symbiotic and parasitic
one where a select few are protected from the marketplace at the
expense of everyone else. Koreans’ record-setting penchant for
going under the knife for plastic surgery shows that Koreans have
very low self-esteem and that there are many Koreans who seem to gain
their self-esteem through the approval (or disapproval) of others
rather than from within themselves.

The
many problems that plague Korean society can trace their roots to
moral, psychological, ethical, cultural, political, and economic
causes that were not non-existent in pre-modern Korean society. The
fact that other countries that practice very different beliefs and
cultural mores share the same problems that plague Korea goes to show
that it is probable that people from other countries and other cultures face the same sets
of moral, psychological ethical, cultural, political, and economic
problems that plague Koreans. By merely observing that those other
countries also practice capitalism without bothering to go into
detail the possible faults that lie within people’s values system,
TK committed the logical fallacy that is known as post hoc ergo
propter hoc.

As
I said earlier, however, TK doesn’t despise the automobile or the light bulb. He recognizes that capitalism has helped to bring about
“unprecedented wealth (albeit distributed unevenly), advanced
medical science and greater knowledge about the world around us.”
He’s no Luddite. As such, even if it were somehow possible, he
does not agree that it would be desirable for people to go back to a
pre-modern era.

TK
accepts reality for what it is. He merely wishes that people could
go back to a pre-modern era without having to give up all the
“unprecedented wealth (albeit distributed unevenly), advanced
medical science and greater knowledge about the world around us”
that we have achieved through capitalism.

What
that means is that TK wishes that people could enjoy the bountiful
fruits that they have earned through capitalism without the necessity
of practicing capitalism. He wishes that people could enjoy
“unprecedented wealth (albeit distributed unevenly), advanced
medical science and greater knowledge about the world around us”
without the freedom
and rational thought that are necessary
for them to exist.

It
is a wish for the impossible. That is why TK needs to rely
on moral and intellectual uncertainty – “Would Koreans really
want to go back to the way things were, three centuries ago? They
are also exceedingly difficult, and their scope is far greater than a
single national culture or tradition.” – to give a false
profundity to his irrational desire. It is the only way he can
intellectually deceive others as well as himself.

All that being said, however, I recognize that I ought to be fair and give some consideration to the fact that I could be wrong. Capitalism and modernity could possibly be as evil as TK says they are. If they are as evil as TK claims, however, I will gladly march to hell while whistling a happy tune.

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About Me

My name is John Lee and I am currently the editor and writer behind the independently-run blog, “The Korean Foreigner.”

Recently, I have also begun to work as a freelance copy editor for Freedom Factory. Here, with permission from Freedom Factory, I shall post English translations of Freedom Factory’s weekly newsletter “Freedom Voice.”